The thing with Nostr is that the protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.
What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.
There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
there are relays built exactly for this, for rebroadcasting. You can do whatever you want in nostr btw.
this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.
there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
it doesn't explicitly forbdit it. It just doesn't spec it out, because it doesn't need it for the protocol to work. There are already many relays and clients that do just this.
I think GP's point (which I agree with) is that the functionality is almost essential. When it's not part of the spec, then you end up with differing off-spec implementations, and again, centralization risk.
This would be like the HTTP protocol not defining `POST`, and leaving it up to servers and clients to implement it based on however it feels like.
I really like the ideals behind Nostr, but I think its implementation and execution could be better.
It would be more analog to HTTP not specing out how CDNs should work, or Usenet not specing out how DejaNews is going to work. It's infrastructure stuff neither the client nor the simple server has to care about.
The Nostr spec covers what matters, cryptographic identities and unique message ids, that make dumb relays that duplicating messages from elsewhere possible (an area where HTTP or Activity Pub fail at).
But part of the protocol is that user profiles also list the relays where to find their content (where their posts go to) and a second user connects to those relays to fetch their content directly?
> protocol spec expressly forbids relays from forwarding messages to each other.
That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source.
There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays.
> users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays
This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.
Nostr breaks down along the longstanding ambiguity around what 'decentralization' means.
In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.
People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.
Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.
Email requires a message to reach a specific, limited set of participants. Nostr is a public forum, which means an unbounded number of participants who can engage.
Ordering a conversation between an unbounded set across independent nodes leads to misordered interactions not possible if you just centralize. It seems like a small issue, but at scale quality really suffers when some universal, fine-resolution ordering can't be agreed upon.
You can devise many clever schemes to try to avoid centralization and achieve coherency, but if one service is more up to date with more info, it is preferable and offers a more coherent public conversation. Network effects still dominate despite the protocol.
All that said, if I wasn't very aligned with the spirit, I wouldn't care so much to think about it. I'm also aligned with the spirit of Bitcoin but the culture present in both doesn't help it. The fact that Nostr is Bitcoin aligned, meaning it rejects the technical options of protocols taking more risks, hurts it.
The way it handles public keys and identities is very simple and good and to me is very obviously reflective of a good future state. But it's not unique to Nostr.
> Nostr is a public forum, which means an unbounded number of participants who can engage.
Thats why you layer encryption on top of that to restrict the audience to whatever you intend. And yes, traitors in your audience can rebroadcast unencrypted versions of your encrypted one - that is the equivalence of a person reposting a private whatsapp chat on instagram.
There are things like mailing lists since decades and they do fine.
You are assuming that everyone can spam your messages whereas in reality with NOSTR you choose from which relays to get updates. These relays are sovereign in the sense that they can (and will) define the rules and who can use them.
I've never experienced misordered interactions since years of using NOSTR. This might be something of a theoretical issue because in practice that isn't observed.
Users set their own relays. Other users can see this list and use it to send and receive events. It's fixed the need of big common relays.
https://nips.nostr.com/65
So how does this hypothetical client find out what non-big relays have been set by the other users whose notes its user wants to receive, if not by receiving notes from those other users via one of the big common relays?
This is the "bootstrap problem" faced by all p2p networks.
NIP65 suggests spreading relay lists widely and to "pay attention" to popular relays:
> Clients SHOULD spread an author's kind:10002 event to as many relays as viable, paying attention to relays that, at any moment, serve naturally as well-known public indexers for these relay lists (where most other clients and users are connecting to in order to publish and fetch those).
Note this is different to centralising the whole protocol on popular relays. If affects the discovery phase only, and is robust to large relays disappearing.
If clients seed address lists widely they can easily find each other without major centralisation.
> People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure)
Let's not. Decentralization of power is not the same thing as accountability. They are alternatives that can achieve some of the same goals, but in significantly different ways.
My working definition is that a system is decentralized to the extent that a person cannot be banned from it.
I assure myself of a bed to sleep in in a decentralized way: there is a bed in my bedroom, in my house, which I lock with a key, so that nobody can sleep in my bed without my permission (or my wife's). Or I can go to a hotel, if I can find one that is willing to accommodate me, or to a friend's house. I am not accountable to anyone for my bed. If my bed has boxes of books on it and cannot be slept in, nobody will hold me to account. Not even my wife; she has her own bed. It is impossible to ban me from the Bed System, other than by arresting me; even if you took the bed out of my house, I could go over to my friend's house and sleep there, or I could get a new bed from a store, or from someone who's selling theirs.
This is somewhat inefficient. For example, tonight my wife is visiting her parents, so nobody will be using her bed. This kind of thing results in the community in aggregate needing more beds than people.
If I were staying in a homeless shelter, I would instead rely on accountability. If I arrived at the shelter and there was no bed available to me, I would complain to the staff. I would attempt to complain to the manager. I might at some point write a letter to their funding agencies. Depending on factors like my social status, I might or might not obtain some kind of alternative accommodation, and homeless shelters that systematically failed to provide accommodations to their clients might be shut down, or they might not.
If the homeless-shelter system in an area is completely centralized, accountability is all I'd have, and banning me from that system could be done at the stroke of a pen. But if there's some degree of decentralization, I might hoof it to another shelter, and perhaps find accommodation. Otherwise, I'm stuck either looking for a place to sleep on the sidewalk where nobody will steal my shoes, or maybe trying to find a bus ride long enough to permit me to nap in a seat for an hour or so, because I am significantly vulnerable to the centralized power of the homeless-shelter staff.
Despite its efficiency, this is considerably worse than my current actual situation, in which I really don't have to worry very much about having a bed to sleep in tonight, considerably lowering my stress level.
So accountability is very different in practice from decentralization of power. And that is why we prefer the Bed System, and most other necessities of daily life, to be decentralized.
In the case of Nostr, the idea is for relays to enjoy economies of scale without enjoying centralized power, in particular because they don't coordinate. There's always some tension there; if one neighborhood store stops carrying Sugar-Free Speed Energy Drink, you can go to another one, but there's no guarantee they carry it either. So the power enjoyed by the shopkeeper is definitely nonzero, even in ordinary commercial transactions (not to mention if they accuse you of shoplifting, which other shopkeepers might notice).
It's still much less power than that enjoyed by a big-box supermarket in a neighborhood with no neighborhood stores, and often economies of scale tend to drive neighborhood stores out of business when a big-box store moves in.
As an alternative to trying to decentralize your food retail system in neighborhood stores, you could try to centralize it and make it accountable, with a food co-op. If the co-op members don't like the food buying de...
In the context of 'decentralized tech' I've come to believe literal 'decentralization' has unavoidably poor network effects, while 'accountability' gives what people envision from 'decentralization' without the tradeoffs—by being a more fundamental property (decentralization can emerge from it if required).
> If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized.
> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr.
As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else.
I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.
There is a feature called "follow" so just follow the people with topics you are interested, same as any network unless you prefer tiktok-style algorithms that choose everything for you.
Funny timing on this - I just came across my backed up keys recently and signed back into it. Poking around over the last 24 hours has left me underwhelmed in terms of actual interesting content (I'm not a cryptobro) nor overly innovative things built on top of the protocol.
Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
Social media is one of its most underwhelming usecases, there's loads of productivity apps building on it like if you look that formstr ecosystem (about.formstr.app) and gaming ecosystem as well, it's really just a new communication medium
It's a very rich protocol with many advanced features but here are the basics:
1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM)
2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos
3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff
4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read
5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues
6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group
7. Like twitch with live video streams
8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
I build edtechs apps with it. Lets me develop tech like the ability to create scholarships with learning, cross-platform badges/achievements and cool stuff like that.
Adoption by too narrow an audience can totally poison a protocol for the rest of us.
Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.
Maybe they want to torrent Linux ISOs but can't because their ISP/VPN blocks the torrent protocol. Http for server->client downloading is inferior but we are stuck with it.
Lack of BitTorrent support in browsers is big thing that is missing. Brave and Opera have it, but all the mainstream browsers don't. Thus torrent downloads never got out of its specific niche.
That said, I don't think piracy is to blame here, but more the murky nature of copyright in general, with BitTorrent you automatically become redistributor of everything you download and that's just a huge liability and privacy risk that I can easily see browser developers wanting to avoid.
Also browser developers have gotten lazy, they couldn't even find the resources to keep FTP alive, so I doubt BitTorrent would have survived for long even if they tried adding it.
I don't think I'd even call it that. FTP had one purpose: it was an early protocol for remotely managing files. It never had any intent to support dynamically generated or otherwise "virtual" content (as supported by e.g. CGI scripts and mod_rewrite in Apache), and I don't think anyone has ever made a serious attempt to implement that. There's no practical use case for it.
Even as a file management protocol, though, FTP sucks. Its connection management is primitive in the extreme - one TCP connection per transfer - and that ruins performance for transfers involving many files, and is difficult to with firewalls and load balancers. FTPS encryption is an afterthought, and makes small-file performance even worse (as each connection requires separate TLS negotiation). There's no standard format for directory listings, just ad-hoc parsers for "ls -l" output. Support for modern filesystem features like extended attributes is largely nonexistent.
FTP was written for an early version of TCP/IP (which wasn't called that). Maybe you're thinking of UUCP, which did often run over dial-up circuits and was used for email, but didn't require two connections.
No, I was thinking of FTP, but I was probably off the mark anyway: I'd noticed that FTP was mentioned in the RFCs and surrounding discussions long before RFC 793, and that it seemed to be behaving like a point-to-point network, but it hadn't occurred to me that it might have just been using an ancestor of TCP/IP -- some variant of the "Host protocol" perhaps?
Hard to get the full context, it was before my time: my beard may be grey now, but I'm not that old.
The original version of TCP/IP was (is currently thought to have been) called Network Control Program/Protocol or NCP. There's a reason current legacy IP is version number 4.
Yes, in every way except that servers and clients normally support upload while HTTP ones don't. This is the main reason to use it.
But you should use SFTP instead. This is SSH's replacement for FTP. It's not the same as FTPS which is useless.
We don't have to keep old protocols that offer nothing alive. Maybe a couple of clients and servers to demonstrate with, but it's a museum piece, not useful code. That's not an insult - museums are important.
I took a bioinformatics class, students were emailing large files around via the university's email portal. The files were frequently corrupted somewhere along the way. I had to show them how to check hashes and then they would just repeatedly download the file until they got one without errors. But then the sysadmin showed up and asked us to stop downloading multi-gig files repeatedly from his server.
I proposed bittorrent as the solution and the sysadmin lost his mind.
Without the piracy stigma, I think we'd just have integrtated it into email clients. The user doesn't need to know that the "attachment" is actually a torrent file, they should just "download" it and end up with a reliable copy of what was sent.
I mean when you start organizing the next jan 6th event the press (not this admin's fbi) is gonna go straight to nostr pages for research on the time and places and what will happen.
When you dive deeper into NOSTR you'd find completely encrypted communities with a privacy level far higher than mainstream products because the servers here can be completely randomized and very difficult to track: https://primal.net/e/nevent1qqszqwr0f8pclmskaydx9x4lvwh057zj...
The other advantage is that NOSTR doesn't necessarily run on the internet only. Things like LoRa and radio waves are within reach and even harder for eavesdropping. Not that I would care about protests nor governments in general, my typical focus is communication when electricity/internet are gone.
Same problem as with telegram messenger or tor browser: once you promote censorship resistance and inability to be deplatformed, it attracts people who previously got censored and deplatformed. Then on the other hand, when the hong kong protesters and the ukraine soldiers used it for their purposes, it is a welcome freedom tech (unless you are china or russia). Decentralization and true censorship resistance will always be a double-edged sword.
For me, the great idea behind Nostr is that identity is a self-generated key pair, which can then be used wherever you want (and the economic model, with much potentials). In terms of decentralisation, however, I'm not convinced; I find the model of the late ZeroNet, the KAD network and others, essentially DHT, far superior, because it allows content to stay alive as long as there's interest in it, and every member of the network donates a certain amount of storage and bandwidth (adjustable at will) without being able to choose which specific scrap of content to host.
In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.
The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:
- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)
- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)
- short posts like Twitter/X
- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit
- very long, blog-style posts
- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar
We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
I tried very hard to develop for Nostr with the idea it was an inclusive communication commons. Turns out it was a Lightning Network payments promotion project. All of its users (aside from its creator) were very much more interested in Lightning than in Nostr. Dismal experience, still bitter about the effort I wasted on it.
I honestly think it would be completely legit to build a completely separate ecosystem on top of the same protocol. A separate set of relays, separate apps which connect to those relays by default, no lighting payments, different defaults, marketed to a different audience. Ultimately it is not just a single network. If users need interoperability eventually they can easily add other relays. But it's true that many people are put off by the current community.
Nah, you didn't understand it. Lightning is a layer-2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Nostr is the so-called layer-3. Good luck trying to build Nostr without Lightning.
It’s easy to have Nostr without it. Lightning support was an afterthought and you can just choose not to implement that NIP in the client. On the relay side you could just filter out that event type. Not hard at all.
The amount of ignorance about Nostr (by both pro and antis) is astounding for such a simple concept. I feel like literally nobody reads the very short specs.
That is really not doing it justice. Some people say the same about podcasting 2.0, but it is so much more, even Apple is starting to pick up features from it (chapters, artwork, transcripts). Not the Lighthing/boosting no. But that's ok right?
Many people get all emotional around crypto and blow it out of proportions imho. Sure there are many bad things about it, but to let your opinion of crypto taint so many nice tings is sad imho.
If you really think that crypto people invented podcast chapters and transcripts, you might want to do a reality check.
These have been around in podcatchers for a long time, see e.g. [1] for chapter markers. Apple lagging behind on podcasting features/quasi-standards is also the norm, not the exception.
NOSTR is a protocol so there's no entity for you to be bitter with... You can be annoyed at the people who were on there, but that's a different subject.
There's probably a better analogy than this, but what you're describing would be like playing soccer and being annoyed that your teammates are furries. Go find another team to play with.
But now imagine that the regulating body of your favorite hobby sport is deeply corrupt and fundamentally profit driven, so while playing with your friends is still fun, just thinking about ever competing at the regional level makes you shiver. [1]
Sure, you can always fork a protocol/not federate with who you dislike etc., but you might find yourself fighting an uphill battle against other people’s experiences and preconceptions. Protocols are ultimately always designed by people too.
[1] Note that I have no experience with either Nostr or professional football, so take this as a purely hypothetical analogy with no relation to real organizations. I have to assume both are lovely passion projects by people that just share a common passion.
if the protocol were to change, clients and relays would have to also be willing to adopt the change, almost if not all of which are open-source and easily forked if a large population did not care to pull in those changes. Sure there's always someone guiding the direction, but I don't know how much better you can get than that.
You can't blame the protocol for the user it attracts. It is in early development. Just imagine the year is 1996 and you are complaining that WWW, IRC and the USENET is full of male tech nerds with a STEM background and a taste in SciFi/Fantasy culture. It will take some a while for the evolution to happen until you can get your beauty and makeup styling content.
>you are complaining that WWW, IRC and the USENET is full of male tech nerds with a STEM background and a taste in SciFi/Fantasy culture
that'd be a big step up because when I tried Nostr the last time I didn't even see people discussing computer science or pulp literature, but just random cryptocurrency nonsense, the equivalent of a room full of high school dropouts trying to sell you Tupperware at the door
I do think you can blame a protocol for the users it attracts. The medium's the message. A protocol is designed with intent, if there was no relation between a protocol and its users, what's the point of inventing it, just use an existing one.
That is an unfair judgement. There are people there using LN, just as there are others using Monero, BCH or whatever crypto rocks their boat.
I develop for NOSTR and use zero cryptocurrencies because the communication aspect is what matters, especially the account with npubs which are basically universal entry cards to avoid anyone having to create separate accounts just to use some website or app.
These things have more effects than you think. IPFS just lost all funding because the NFT craze is over and they didn't find any alternative grift. That means the public gateways and general knowledge of the project will fade away and there won't be maintenance on the software.
IPFS did not lose all funding. Please check your facts.
IPFS has largely failed to find adoption as a protocol because it was over engineered and did not give users what they want.
People don't want decentralization. What they want is the downstream effects of decentralization like privacy, disaggregation of powerful entities, and permissionless participation.
For a protocol to be adopted it needs to give individual users these things in practice, not simply be "decentralized" in design.
In its early inception, it wasn't so bad about that. As it grew, though, it became insular and favored those who were going to the conventions for bitcoin and shouted things like "Pura Vida". My "done with it" moment was when there was a lady from some Latin American place who was asking for donations so she could go to one of those Bitcoin talks in Costa Rica, and everyone ignored her. It was weird to see people going to her basic geography, and completing ignoring and leaving someone behind who was "very into" the ethos, but said much about the project.
If you’re talking about who I think you are, it’s because she is a scammer and a stalker and everyone on Nostr is completely fed up with her. The community is extraordinarily welcoming of honest people producing honest content.
Took a look and when I got there, the first post was about bitcoin, the second was an add for a cryptocurrency app, the next one was about nostr and bitcoin. The fourth was actually unrelated to either ! But then it was crypto or nostr again. Terrible way to make a first impression (unless you are into crypto I suppose).
The homepage could be a description of ATProto. Except lots of people around me already use ATproto, and a successful European instance has just been launched, Eurosky, focusing on expanding the protocol with apps doing other things than micro-messages (Bluesky).
The nice thing about open, federated protocols is that it is relatively easy to connect them together. There actually is a Mastodon to Bluesky bridge already for example. These protocols should compete on merit. There's no good fundamental reason for them to not federate each other's content. But there are lots of non technical reasons. For example mastodon users particularly are quite picky about how their content is filtered and used. Even implementing a search engine is something that gets a lot of pushback.
The reason people might care is taking ownership of how they filter and curate their feed. Instead of outsourcing that to some algorithm owned by a company, having a federated network allows you to pick and choose or even implement your own filtering if you self host. It also gets advertising as the primary revenue mechanism out of the way and that removes a conflict of interest between what users want to see and what advertisers want them to see.
Of course the drooling masses on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. seem to be perfectly happy to have their endocrine system manipulated by self tuning algorithms. But there are some legitimate concerns about whether that's actually healthy for them. Federated social networks provide an alternative to this.
I actually agree with you. Nostr is a new, unique technology, akin to a simpler XMPP with social features already baked in at an early stage. It’s not a messenger or a social network, yet it includes features from both.
Extensible, resilient communications without the threat of a central third party silencing you is quite appealing.
Dang can ban you, or me, or anyone. Doesn't make HN a bad forum. On the contrary, HN's moderation quality is widely praised and appreciated. Now imagine if it was free for all anarcho-libertarian forum. Or as another example a mastodon, where decentralization is touted as a huge benefit, but in practice it is a collection of extremely strict centralized islands, where a ban can lead to one's identity account forever lost, but unlike on HN, there is no public accountability to the instance mods there.
Mastodon is indeed a collection of small social networks with limited interoperability. Federated toots are second-class toots - you won't see all their replies. Think of how iMessage degrades when someone in the conversation isn't using it.
ATproto is defacto not decentralized and the protocol is about 50x more complicated to get working than NOSTR.
Whereas in ATproto you have to find a place to register an account, say a domain for yourself or use someone else's domain, in NOSTR creating an account is nothing more than a public/private key that is generated on the fly.
Then is the storage of information. Whereas in ATproto information is stored in plenty of different formats and specific folder configurations which are easy to miss, in NOSTR is all JSON from a single base template file.
Third is the absence of global moderation and islands. Whereas in ATproto only a few (I think 3 main providers) exist, you can be kicked out from them and effectively stop reaching your audience. In NOSTR if a relay stops receiving your texts it is a bummer but there are hundreds of other volunteer-based servers to where you can send your texts, so it is very difficult to block people from reading texts of the authors they are interested.
Simplicity is the key. NOSTR is the first and only network that I've seen so far where content/authors are truly disconnected from the servers hosting their data.
So then you go around using "maelito@lemonde.fr" and anyone can find your public key on the official Le Monde site, verify that you are indeed someone associated to that domain.
Why is it not? I'm sincerely curious. It seems to include users that were excluded from other platforms, by virtue of making centralized censorship impossible, so I would argue it's more inclusive than anything else.
Or do you mean its follow-based mechanism doesn't allow you to silence users you not only don't want to hear, but you don't want anyone to hear? This, again, makes it more inclusive to me, not less.
I really like nostr because it gives you freedom of association. You can unfollow other users and, if you run a relay, you can refuse to accept content from users you don't like, but you can't ban other relays (like mastodon does) and you can't refuse content based on relays other users use, because you don't know. In other words, you only can ignore people you don't like but you can't meaningfully deplatform them or prevent them from looking at or following your content. That's how it should be and, incidentally, that's what makes people in favour of deplatforming furious, which can only be a good thing :)
Unfortunately nostr has little network effect because the current ecosystem was stood up by bitcoin enthusiasts, and there's no much generalist discourse on it. Luckily, it's a simple protocol and it's really hard to kill protocols in the first place. Maybe the next censorship debacle on the current alternative social media platforms will give it a boost, or maybe it will remain a small niche group of ecosystems for specialized users? Who knows, but I'm glad it exists.
The discussion in this thread doesn't seem to be a level of quality I would expect from Hacker News. Many people attacking a protocol because they don't like how it's being used. It's sad, I was hoping to see something more constructive.
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[ 8.7 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] thread- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbt3jL1Ms0w
What this means is that users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays, or congregate around specific ones. User profile data will list the relays they listen on, but this suffers from the problem of sticky defaults and makes client authors the kingmakers.
There's lots of centralization pressures like this that the protocol maintainers don't have a good answer to. They tout the simplicity of the protocol, which is often a virtue, but they overdid it and made the protocol too simple to achieve its goals.
this is also not entirely needed since you publish a list of relays you use, and so clients publish notes for you to them and you read from the relays of people you interact with.
there are many different people/teams working on different aspects of nostr, there are no protocol maintainers.
This would be like the HTTP protocol not defining `POST`, and leaving it up to servers and clients to implement it based on however it feels like.
I really like the ideals behind Nostr, but I think its implementation and execution could be better.
The Nostr spec covers what matters, cryptographic identities and unique message ids, that make dumb relays that duplicating messages from elsewhere possible (an area where HTTP or Activity Pub fail at).
That statement is false and if you disagree: please provide a source.
There is no such restriction on the NIP (protocol guidelines). I have been writing NOSTR software since years and there was NEVER such restriction in place. In fact, wouldn't even make sense because some relays (e.g. Primal) are super-aggregators for smaller relays.
> users trying to reach each other need to shotgun messages to many relays
This is a false statement. NIP 65 provides a list of which servers the users declares to be using. This way readers for that user know at which door (server) to knock and ask for updates.
Isn't this true of any protocol (to a greater or lesser degree)?
The idea of nostr is that you can do whatever the you like. An open protocol. There is no forbidding of anything
Promise not to prosecute me if I spam the network?
And how do you exactly envision enforcement? Ohhhh, you copied some bits, you going to jail!!
Did you read the actual protocol or are you just making things up on HN?
In the literal sense, centralization leads to economies of scale and the alleviation of coordination issues. Those coordination issues are what make physically decentralized networks so complicated, inefficient and fractured. These networks usually just find ways to centralize despite.
People really want decentralization of power—let's just replace the word with a better word: accountability. One should be able to enjoy economies of scale (centralized infrastructure) but have the cryptographic mechanisms in place to ensure the infrastructure must reveal its use and abuse of power, and can be easily replaced.
Nostr, like most 'decentralized' tech will switch between the meanings of both. Either way, it fits the description above: a single relay can work well, multiple have awkward coordination. The sense it which it is accountable is only that it can be replaced, but network effects favor the largest, so that's a problem.
Same thing with email that you've been using for decades, doesn't get simpler than that.
Ordering a conversation between an unbounded set across independent nodes leads to misordered interactions not possible if you just centralize. It seems like a small issue, but at scale quality really suffers when some universal, fine-resolution ordering can't be agreed upon.
You can devise many clever schemes to try to avoid centralization and achieve coherency, but if one service is more up to date with more info, it is preferable and offers a more coherent public conversation. Network effects still dominate despite the protocol.
All that said, if I wasn't very aligned with the spirit, I wouldn't care so much to think about it. I'm also aligned with the spirit of Bitcoin but the culture present in both doesn't help it. The fact that Nostr is Bitcoin aligned, meaning it rejects the technical options of protocols taking more risks, hurts it.
The way it handles public keys and identities is very simple and good and to me is very obviously reflective of a good future state. But it's not unique to Nostr.
Thats why you layer encryption on top of that to restrict the audience to whatever you intend. And yes, traitors in your audience can rebroadcast unencrypted versions of your encrypted one - that is the equivalence of a person reposting a private whatsapp chat on instagram.
You are assuming that everyone can spam your messages whereas in reality with NOSTR you choose from which relays to get updates. These relays are sovereign in the sense that they can (and will) define the rules and who can use them.
I've never experienced misordered interactions since years of using NOSTR. This might be something of a theoretical issue because in practice that isn't observed.
No. You can write a client that does not use popular relays and it will work fine.
I don't know very much about Nostr, so I don't know the answers to these questions, or even if they are the right questions to ask.
NIP65 suggests spreading relay lists widely and to "pay attention" to popular relays:
> Clients SHOULD spread an author's kind:10002 event to as many relays as viable, paying attention to relays that, at any moment, serve naturally as well-known public indexers for these relay lists (where most other clients and users are connecting to in order to publish and fetch those).
Note this is different to centralising the whole protocol on popular relays. If affects the discovery phase only, and is robust to large relays disappearing.
If clients seed address lists widely they can easily find each other without major centralisation.
Let's not. Decentralization of power is not the same thing as accountability. They are alternatives that can achieve some of the same goals, but in significantly different ways.
My working definition is that a system is decentralized to the extent that a person cannot be banned from it.
I assure myself of a bed to sleep in in a decentralized way: there is a bed in my bedroom, in my house, which I lock with a key, so that nobody can sleep in my bed without my permission (or my wife's). Or I can go to a hotel, if I can find one that is willing to accommodate me, or to a friend's house. I am not accountable to anyone for my bed. If my bed has boxes of books on it and cannot be slept in, nobody will hold me to account. Not even my wife; she has her own bed. It is impossible to ban me from the Bed System, other than by arresting me; even if you took the bed out of my house, I could go over to my friend's house and sleep there, or I could get a new bed from a store, or from someone who's selling theirs.
This is somewhat inefficient. For example, tonight my wife is visiting her parents, so nobody will be using her bed. This kind of thing results in the community in aggregate needing more beds than people.
If I were staying in a homeless shelter, I would instead rely on accountability. If I arrived at the shelter and there was no bed available to me, I would complain to the staff. I would attempt to complain to the manager. I might at some point write a letter to their funding agencies. Depending on factors like my social status, I might or might not obtain some kind of alternative accommodation, and homeless shelters that systematically failed to provide accommodations to their clients might be shut down, or they might not.
If the homeless-shelter system in an area is completely centralized, accountability is all I'd have, and banning me from that system could be done at the stroke of a pen. But if there's some degree of decentralization, I might hoof it to another shelter, and perhaps find accommodation. Otherwise, I'm stuck either looking for a place to sleep on the sidewalk where nobody will steal my shoes, or maybe trying to find a bus ride long enough to permit me to nap in a seat for an hour or so, because I am significantly vulnerable to the centralized power of the homeless-shelter staff.
Despite its efficiency, this is considerably worse than my current actual situation, in which I really don't have to worry very much about having a bed to sleep in tonight, considerably lowering my stress level.
So accountability is very different in practice from decentralization of power. And that is why we prefer the Bed System, and most other necessities of daily life, to be decentralized.
In the case of Nostr, the idea is for relays to enjoy economies of scale without enjoying centralized power, in particular because they don't coordinate. There's always some tension there; if one neighborhood store stops carrying Sugar-Free Speed Energy Drink, you can go to another one, but there's no guarantee they carry it either. So the power enjoyed by the shopkeeper is definitely nonzero, even in ordinary commercial transactions (not to mention if they accuse you of shoplifting, which other shopkeepers might notice).
It's still much less power than that enjoyed by a big-box supermarket in a neighborhood with no neighborhood stores, and often economies of scale tend to drive neighborhood stores out of business when a big-box store moves in.
As an alternative to trying to decentralize your food retail system in neighborhood stores, you could try to centralize it and make it accountable, with a food co-op. If the co-op members don't like the food buying de...
Decentralizing power means that many people are made powerful in their own respects.
Accountability means that one person or a small group of people are made powerful, but there are checks or mechanisms on that person's power.
These have vastly different impliciations for how organizations and groups of people develop and grow and interact.
In the context of 'decentralized tech' I've come to believe literal 'decentralization' has unavoidably poor network effects, while 'accountability' gives what people envision from 'decentralization' without the tradeoffs—by being a more fundamental property (decentralization can emerge from it if required).
To paraphrase:
> If you Used Nostr your communication would be completely uncensored and decentralized.
> Yeah, but it would all be with the kind of people who use Nostr.
As of now it’s filled with BTC-maxis / crypto bros that mainly talk about how great Nostr and Bitcoin are … and not much else. I suppose there’s plenty of tasteless AI slop and gross adult scams if that suits your palate.
Those who are finding it useful - can you give me some direction on things I may have missed? It feels less useful than blsky which feels less useful mastodon which feels less useful than X...
1. Like twitter/x: Follow people, post notes, write comments, use hashtags. Send direct messages (DM) 2. Like Instagram: watch/post just photos or just videos 3. Like ebay: Sell or buy stuff 4. Like reddit: join public communities and post or read 5. Like slack: create private groups for chatting with friends or colleagues 6. Like Skype/zoom: voice and video calls with a person or a group 7. Like twitch with live video streams 8. Like nothing else: send and receive bitcoin (lightning)
Bit torrent is a superior way to move data around (as compared with http downloads). But its early associations appear to have forever tainted it against widespread adoption.
Others peer to peer sharing platforms got much more popular despite mainstream news about them like LimeWire and eMule
That said, I don't think piracy is to blame here, but more the murky nature of copyright in general, with BitTorrent you automatically become redistributor of everything you download and that's just a huge liability and privacy risk that I can easily see browser developers wanting to avoid.
Also browser developers have gotten lazy, they couldn't even find the resources to keep FTP alive, so I doubt BitTorrent would have survived for long even if they tried adding it.
I don't think I'd even call it that. FTP had one purpose: it was an early protocol for remotely managing files. It never had any intent to support dynamically generated or otherwise "virtual" content (as supported by e.g. CGI scripts and mod_rewrite in Apache), and I don't think anyone has ever made a serious attempt to implement that. There's no practical use case for it.
Even as a file management protocol, though, FTP sucks. Its connection management is primitive in the extreme - one TCP connection per transfer - and that ruins performance for transfers involving many files, and is difficult to with firewalls and load balancers. FTPS encryption is an afterthought, and makes small-file performance even worse (as each connection requires separate TLS negotiation). There's no standard format for directory listings, just ad-hoc parsers for "ls -l" output. Support for modern filesystem features like extended attributes is largely nonexistent.
Hard to get the full context, it was before my time: my beard may be grey now, but I'm not that old.
But you should use SFTP instead. This is SSH's replacement for FTP. It's not the same as FTPS which is useless.
We don't have to keep old protocols that offer nothing alive. Maybe a couple of clients and servers to demonstrate with, but it's a museum piece, not useful code. That's not an insult - museums are important.
I proposed bittorrent as the solution and the sysadmin lost his mind.
Without the piracy stigma, I think we'd just have integrtated it into email clients. The user doesn't need to know that the "attachment" is actually a torrent file, they should just "download" it and end up with a reliable copy of what was sent.
Truly awful to have decentralized freedom.
The other advantage is that NOSTR doesn't necessarily run on the internet only. Things like LoRa and radio waves are within reach and even harder for eavesdropping. Not that I would care about protests nor governments in general, my typical focus is communication when electricity/internet are gone.
In the Nostr model, in the end, even if everyone set up (as I do) a personal relay to hold their own posts and a personal Blossom server (video/images), decentralisation would still be hit-and-miss. Everyone would either have to import everything or do a painstaking job of choosing what to import just to have it available, and there's no decent discoverability, WoT is not much a thing for such purpose.
The biggest immediate problem, however, is that there isn't a single, easily hostable piece of software that includes everything Nostr is ready to do now:
- relay, Blossom server (here we have Haven, and MOAR)
- chat (not just in the relay, but as a UI too)
- short posts like Twitter/X
- long posts filterable by topic (currently only tags) to recreate the experience of Usenet/Forums/Reddit
- very long, blog-style posts
- VoIP with a Coturn server or similar
We have all of this in separate clients and relays, often semi-abandoned, sketched out and never finished, and we're missing a unified UI, just as our communication needs are unified (think of Emacs/Gnus with the idea of bringing together every text message, email, news, feeds, even Reddit and HN). All of this should be sovereign, meaning, for example, hostable on one's own relay as a single Go, Rust, or Python package, proxyable via NGINX, and potentially reachable via Tor or I2P for those behind a NAT. It's a massive job, but the reality is that everything is already there, it just needs putting together.
Nah, you didn't understand it. Lightning is a layer-2 protocol on top of bitcoin. Nostr is the so-called layer-3. Good luck trying to build Nostr without Lightning.
The amount of ignorance about Nostr (by both pro and antis) is astounding for such a simple concept. I feel like literally nobody reads the very short specs.
Many people get all emotional around crypto and blow it out of proportions imho. Sure there are many bad things about it, but to let your opinion of crypto taint so many nice tings is sad imho.
These have been around in podcatchers for a long time, see e.g. [1] for chapter markers. Apple lagging behind on podcasting features/quasi-standards is also the norm, not the exception.
[1] https://id3.org/id3v2-chapters-1.0
Sure, you can always fork a protocol/not federate with who you dislike etc., but you might find yourself fighting an uphill battle against other people’s experiences and preconceptions. Protocols are ultimately always designed by people too.
[1] Note that I have no experience with either Nostr or professional football, so take this as a purely hypothetical analogy with no relation to real organizations. I have to assume both are lovely passion projects by people that just share a common passion.
About the only ownerless protocol is Bitcoin (not Ethereum, Monero or any other one) and it still has an entity with soft power over it.
Anything like this in 2026?
that'd be a big step up because when I tried Nostr the last time I didn't even see people discussing computer science or pulp literature, but just random cryptocurrency nonsense, the equivalent of a room full of high school dropouts trying to sell you Tupperware at the door
I do think you can blame a protocol for the users it attracts. The medium's the message. A protocol is designed with intent, if there was no relation between a protocol and its users, what's the point of inventing it, just use an existing one.
I develop for NOSTR and use zero cryptocurrencies because the communication aspect is what matters, especially the account with npubs which are basically universal entry cards to avoid anyone having to create separate accounts just to use some website or app.
There are so many clients, here is a site that tries to keep up with what exists: https://nostrapps.com/
IPFS has largely failed to find adoption as a protocol because it was over engineered and did not give users what they want.
People don't want decentralization. What they want is the downstream effects of decentralization like privacy, disaggregation of powerful entities, and permissionless participation.
For a protocol to be adopted it needs to give individual users these things in practice, not simply be "decentralized" in design.
But then they don’t have no issue giving money to powerful people that likely don’t share their righteous worldview.
Also, even purely in the umbrella of "giving money to strangers for them to have fun", a bitcoin conference is a weak use.
Why should I care ? Honest question.
The reason people might care is taking ownership of how they filter and curate their feed. Instead of outsourcing that to some algorithm owned by a company, having a federated network allows you to pick and choose or even implement your own filtering if you self host. It also gets advertising as the primary revenue mechanism out of the way and that removes a conflict of interest between what users want to see and what advertisers want them to see.
Of course the drooling masses on Tik Tok, Instagram, etc. seem to be perfectly happy to have their endocrine system manipulated by self tuning algorithms. But there are some legitimate concerns about whether that's actually healthy for them. Federated social networks provide an alternative to this.
Extensible, resilient communications without the threat of a central third party silencing you is quite appealing.
Whereas in ATproto you have to find a place to register an account, say a domain for yourself or use someone else's domain, in NOSTR creating an account is nothing more than a public/private key that is generated on the fly.
Then is the storage of information. Whereas in ATproto information is stored in plenty of different formats and specific folder configurations which are easy to miss, in NOSTR is all JSON from a single base template file.
Third is the absence of global moderation and islands. Whereas in ATproto only a few (I think 3 main providers) exist, you can be kicked out from them and effectively stop reaching your audience. In NOSTR if a relay stops receiving your texts it is a bummer but there are hundreds of other volunteer-based servers to where you can send your texts, so it is very difficult to block people from reading texts of the authors they are interested.
Simplicity is the key. NOSTR is the first and only network that I've seen so far where content/authors are truly disconnected from the servers hosting their data.
OK so Nostr is for people that look for pure decentralisation ? This decentralisation so complicated that no general public person will ever connect ?
Where owning lemonde.fr doesn't distinguish you from a user pretending to be the biggest national French newspaper ?
Le Monde adds a text file at https://lemonde.fr/.well-known/nostr.json with the npubs (NOSTR public keys) of every person that they certify as trusted.
So then you go around using "maelito@lemonde.fr" and anyone can find your public key on the official Le Monde site, verify that you are indeed someone associated to that domain.
Oh come on now.
Unfortunately nostr has little network effect because the current ecosystem was stood up by bitcoin enthusiasts, and there's no much generalist discourse on it. Luckily, it's a simple protocol and it's really hard to kill protocols in the first place. Maybe the next censorship debacle on the current alternative social media platforms will give it a boost, or maybe it will remain a small niche group of ecosystems for specialized users? Who knows, but I'm glad it exists.
What exactly is the fundamentally new architecture in Nostr?
> ...with a chance of working
[citation needed] I think.